Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Freemasonry in the United States is the history of Freemasonry as it was introduced from Britain and continues as a major secret society to the present day. It is a fraternal order that brings men together (and women through its auxiliaries) to gain friendship and opportunity for advancement and community progress.
The second-oldest Latin-letter society, the P.D.A. Society ("Please Don't Ask"), in 1776 refused entry to John Heath, then a student at the college; rebuffed, he in the same year established the first Greek-letter secret society at the college, the Phi Beta Kappa, modeling it on the two older fraternities (see the Flat Hat Club). The Phi Beta ...
Roberts believed Freemasonry was a "mystery" or "alternate" religion and encouraged his church not to support ministers who were Freemasons. Freedom from secret societies is one of the "frees" upon which the Free Methodist Church was founded. [178]
The history of Freemasonry encompasses the origins, evolution and defining events of the fraternal organisation known as Freemasonry.It covers three phases. Firstly, the emergence of organised lodges of operative masons during the Middle Ages, then the admission of lay members as "accepted" (a term reflecting the ceremonial "acception" process that made non-stone masons members of an operative ...
The exact qualifications for labeling a group a secret society are disputed, but definitions generally rely on the degree to which the organization insists on secrecy, and might involve the retention and transmission of secret knowledge, the denial of membership or knowledge of the group, the creation of personal bonds between members of the organization, and the use of secret rites or rituals ...
The whole system is transmitted to initiates through the medium of Masonic ritual, which consists of lectures and allegorical plays. [2] Common to all of Freemasonry is the three grade system of Craft or Blue Lodge freemasonry, whose allegory is centred on the building of the Temple of Solomon, and the story of the chief architect, Hiram Abiff. [3]
There is some debate as to exactly when Freemasonry in the Anglo-American tradition started requiring its members to have a belief in Deity. There are hints that this was the case from the earliest days of Freemasonry: The Regius Manuscript, the oldest known Masonic document dating from around 1390, states that a Mason "must love well God and holy church always."
In the Papal constitution Ecclesiam a Jesu Christo (1821) Pope Pius VII linked the anticlerical Italian secret society, the Carbonari to Freemasonry. [15] In the period between Italian unification (1870) and the Lateran Treaties (1929) there was a cold war between the Papacy and the Kingdom of Italy (see Prisoner in the Vatican).